Hi. Perhaps you’ve noticed something new around here. Note that ALL url’s from distortion.badstuff.net are redirecting to badstuff.net/mav automatically. Just tidying up, I’m tired of mucking about with subdomains all the goddamn time.
In addition I’m probably going to be throwing up a forum, as Beta’s decided keeping sipclan.net for two posts a goddamn week is kinda useless (to which I wholeheartedly agree.)
In addition, I am presently entertaining interesting and useful usages of my zillion gigs of bandwidth per month. In addition it needs to be legal. Sorry, kiddie porn traders.
On the 4th anniversary of 9/11, it seems fitting to take a look back at the history of government’s response to chaos. Harpers Magazine just happened to be publishing an article on how modern government handles disaster - in short, using it as a prybar to wrest further control from the people. An excerpt, about the 1985 earthquake in Mexico:
“The initial response made it clear that the government cared a lot more about the material city of buildings and wealth than the social city of human beings. In one notorious case, local sweatshop owners paid the police to salvage equipment from their destroyed factories. No effort was made to search for survivors or retrieve the corpses of the night-shift seamstresses. It was as though the earthquake had ripped away a veil concealing the corruption and callousness of the government. International rescue teams were rebuffed, aid money was spent on other programs, supplies were stolen by the police and army, and, in the end, a huge population of the displaced poor was obliged to go on living in tents for many years.”
Sound familiar?
I am officially obsessed with Interdictor’s blog. For those of you who don’t know, this blog is being run by one of the guys at DirectNic, the sister company for Zipa.com, the fine folks who provide the wicked crazy bandwidth for SA. Well, usually, but there was this matter of a small little FUCKING GODAWFUL HURRICANE and they’re headquartered in New Orleans. Right now they’re holding the colo building like a fort. On my list of things that I’d do if I had money: Go to NOLA and help folks like this out.
They managed to keep SA up for somethlng like 72 hours after the hurricane hit on sheer tenacity and good goddamn luck but it finally ended, as their connections to providers keep dropping and nobody shows up to help them fix it. On the upside, the loss of SA’s bandwidth sparked yet another memorable quote from R.Lo:
“Our last-ditch plan is to change the forums into a podcast, then send RSS feeds into the blogosphere so our users can further debate the legality of mashups amongst this month’s 20 ’sexiest’ gadgets.”
